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Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →The North Sea is home to many kinds of fish, including cod, haddock, whiting, herring, sprat, mackerel, sole, plaice, turbot, and brill. These are representative examples, not a complete list: official records cover different areas and purposes, so they do not establish one definitive census of every fish found in the sea.
Fish you may find in the North Sea
North Sea fish include species that swim in open water as well as fish associated with the seabed. Grouping examples this way helps make sense of the variety, but it does not mean every species is equally common across the whole sea or present in every season.
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Open-water fish
Herring, sprat, and mackerel are familiar pelagic fish—fish that live in the water column rather than being closely associated with the seabed. They are examples, not an exhaustive list of North Sea fish that use open water.
Seabed-associated fish
Cod, haddock, whiting, saithe, sole, plaice, turbot, brill, and ling are representative demersal or bottom-associated fish. The flatfish—sole, plaice, turbot, and brill—are especially recognizable examples of fish associated with the seabed.
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Other fish in regional assessments
Regional records and assessments also include European eel, sandeels, starry ray, and catfish. These lists have different scopes: a species appearing in an area-based table or assessment shows it is relevant to that record, but does not establish that it is widespread throughout the North Sea or lives there year-round.
Why North Sea fish lists differ
“North Sea” can refer to a defined reporting or assessment area, sometimes alongside adjacent waters such as the Eastern Channel. The European Union’s 2021 statistical-area table, for example, groups species under North Sea and Eastern Channel headings and includes fish such as perch, flounder, salmon, sea trout, plaice, turbot, brill, sole, and sprat. A peer-reviewed 2013 commercial-fish assessment for the Greater North Sea includes species such as starry ray, Raitt’s and lesser sandeels, catfish, European eel, herring, and plaice. These sources answer different questions, so their entries should be treated as examples rather than combined into a single complete inventory.
A fish listed for an area may be relevant to a commercial-stock assessment, a management boundary, or a biodiversity review. That entry alone does not tell you how abundant the fish is, whether it occurs throughout the sea, or when it is present. A reliable species-by-species answer to those questions requires evidence specific to the fish and location.
What assessments say about North Sea fish
OSPAR’s 2023 Quality Status Report concluded that assessed marine fish were not in good environmental status in the regions it covered, including the Greater North Sea. This is an assessment-level finding; it does not mean every North Sea species or every fish stock has the same status.
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OSPAR reported assessing 316 marine fish species across the Greater North Sea, Celtic Seas, and Bay of Biscay and Iberian Coast, and identified 22 species as threatened and/or in decline in the North-East Atlantic. Those figures cover broader regional assessment work, not a count of all fish living in the North Sea or a North Sea-only tally of threatened species.
Fish monitoring can also track indicators such as sensitive fish populations and the proportion of large fish. The European Environment Agency’s biodiversity portal reports improvement in the proportion of large demersal fish in the Greater North Sea through 2022, conditional on current trends continuing. That indicator does not replace the broader OSPAR assessment or establish the status of every species.
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